Powerful reasons why children benefit from music education.

Playing music improve children’s reading and verbal skills.
Directly music increase level of concentration, memory and self-expression.

What else?
Socializing. Children learned to like each other. They become less stressed and enjoyed school more.

How about spacial learning, thinking?
Playing music builds or modifies neural pathways related to spatial reasoning tasks.
Notice that these are crucial for math, science, chess, etc.

There were studies comparing 4 groups of children.
Theses having: computer lessons, singing lessons, playing lessons (keyboard).
And the last group had nothing like these.
Results:
what really interesting the children who had had the MUSIC classes scored significantly higher – up to 35%  – than the children who did nothing additional  and what surprisingly also 35% higher than children who had computer classes o.[1]
(notice, that these studies were made before 1993).

[1] E W Weber, M Spychiger and J-L Patry, Musik macht Schule. Biografie und Ergebnisse eines Schulversuchs mit erweitertemMusikuntericcht. Padagogik in der Blauen Eule, Bd17. 1993.

Playing music